During the chaotic events of 2020, have you felt your emotions are getting the best of you? If like me, you may have caught yourself asking: “Why is this happening to me?”

Taking in one or the other (or several) webinars and articles by trained psychologists (caveat: I’m no expert!) helped me reframe my thinking about emotions and derive a new perspective on emotional intelligence. I had long thought about emotions as being “in-the-moment” responses. More recently, I have begun to understand the power our emotions have to shape our goals and our future over the long term. We gain emotional intelligence by learning to cope with and overcome hardships, which in turn helps us to emerge more confident, passionate, and fearless.

One perspective from functional medicine helped me re-think and appreciate more deeply the power of emotions. Our cells are listening to our emotional responses, and if we spiral into negativity, all our cells are influenced by our thoughts and feelings. I consider this perspective a reminder that our emotional state has a profound effect on our power to create our desired future.

Here are a few more tips that helped me gauge my emotions, shift my perspective away from self-criticism and working with my emotions to make decisions.

Feeling and Naming our Emotions

Gaining comfort in naming our emotions and identifying where we are feeling can be useful to not letting emotions get the best of us. Start by figuring out the signals the body is sending and identify where it is being felt (e.g., a constricted chest, flushed face, faster heartbeat, heaving chest, a cracking voice or tearing eyes).

Expanding our emotional vocabulary also helps to narrow in on what we are feeling. Emotions are typically one word, for example:

Tired:   exhausted, fatigued, drained

Angry: sad, mad, jealous, resentful, fear

Overwhelmed: stressed, panicked, anxious

Examining what are emotions are telling us is a key step in managing our emotions. assist us in managing our mood and regulating our emotions as we make decisions and take action.

Pressing Pause + Regaining Control

Here are a couple of ways to get comfortable with pressing the pause button and regaining control in order to not act out of emotion.

Journaling

Journaling can help us learn which cues and signals our bodies give us and make us more conscious of our emotional state by helping us see patterns. As we are looking back subjectively, perhaps we are over-empathizing how something used to be or how it always was done which perhaps no longer serves us anymore.

Register Reactivity

This technique is to listen to the voice in your head when things do not go as expected. Rather than spinning out into self-criticism, talk back to the voice and counter the self-criticism.

Making Decisions by Incorporating our Emotions

Finally, the last tip is to use emotions to make sound decisions that propel us towards reaching our future goals.  For example, changing the narrative from “why can’t I…?” (i.e. what’s wrong) to “what can I do in this moment?” helps us to focus on our capacity to do something versus the circumstance we are in. This shift in perspective also serves as a reminder that there is no ideal present, but we can still overcome adversity.